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The African Union may be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but its chair, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is determined to keep the focus on a prosperous future. The success of this future is dependent upon human and agricultural development, and more specifically, the expansion of women’s rights and roles in society.

South Africa announced Friday that it would lift its moratorium on hydrolic fracturing, the controversial natural gas extraction technique known as “fracking.” In response, Treasure the Karoo Action Group (TKAG) is launching a legal battle to protect the ecologically-sensitive, arid area in the Karoo region of the Eastern Cape, under which most of the natural gas lies

The relatively new nation of Qatar recently experienced its first public demonstration. More notably, however, is the fact that the demonstration focused upon climate change, which is indicative of the universal importance of taking climate action.

“When you look at the world and the fights and wars that have been fought,” Wangari told me, “they are always over resources. Sometimes the resources are so degraded, and we are fighting over the little that there is. Sometimes we are fighting over those resources because we do not want to change our way of life. And so managing the resources is an important ingredient to promoting peace.”

Does a large population of sea otters reverse one of the principal causes of climate change? New research from the UC Santa Cruz is suggesting that a population boom of sea otters would go a long way to reduce sea urchin numbers, and therefore allow kelp forests to become very large.

“I think it’s huge that we got a judge to acknowledge that the atmosphere is a public trust asset and the air is a public trust asset,” Abrams said. “It’s the first time we’ve had verbage like this come out of one of these cases.”